The 12 days of GCHQ quizmas: test your brain power with these daily puzzles

This article was taken from the September 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

Each of these dots represents an exoplanet discovered by Nasa's Kepler mission over the last two years -- and now you can explore them in 3D, simply by waving your hands. Data artist Jer Thorp wanted to bring Kepler's discoveries to life, so he hooked up with John Underkoffler, the inventor who built the gesture-based g-speak spatial operating environment (SOE) technology showcased in the 2002 film Minority Report. "I was curious what these planets actually looked like," says Thorp. "How big, how hot, what they were made of." "It was such a deliciously spatial dataset that it cried out for gestural control," says Underkoffler.

ADVERTISEMENT

So over five days in May, the duo created Exo, an immersive g-speak interface at Oblong Industries' Los Angeles studio. Exo is a swirl of 2,327 exoplanets spinning around a single central star, each rendered with its correct relative size, orbit speed, temperature and distance from its sun. "Slip on the g-speak gloves and you can manipulate the planets just by pointing and tipping your hands," explains Underkoffler. A vocabulary of gestures lets you drag out individual planets, rotate their spinning axes and graph relationships such as planet temperature versus planet size. "I wanted to look into the future a little bit, because the data is so sci-fi," says Thorp. "These planets could one day become key to the story of our species." Gesture-based space exploration? No wonder Nasa retired the Space Shuttle <span class="s3">programme.